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A Conversation with Joe Cheng at useR! 2014

·2 mins
useR conference interviews R useR data science RStudio shiny joe cheng
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Eduardo Ariño de la Rubia
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Joe Cheng is a software engineer. Unfortunately the term gets thrown around pretty lightly, so I’d like to make sure that I convey the appropriate amount of gravitas when I refer to him as such. Joe Cheng is a *great* Software Engineer. He has worked for some of the largest technology companies on the planet, building cutting edge tools which empowered the web browser as a full blown platform instead of a historical curiosity. Joe is one of those software engineers who saw a future with the web as a platform for modern software, then worked hard to make it a reality. When the time came to build the next generation of data science IDEs, an IDE targeting the web as a platform, RStudio called Joe.

Joe and I share a traditional computer science background, which made this one of my favorite conversations of useR! 2014. We discussed our view of R, not as professional statisticians or data scientists, but as programmers. R is a fantastic and purpose-built language and environment, but it is unlike most programming environments that either Joe or I have ever encountered. If you’ve ever been curious to learn what shocks traditional computer programmers when they first learn R, you can watch that part of our discussion here.

Joe is currently focused on RStudio’s web application framework, Shiny. Data science as communication is a hot topic, and so much of modern communication can benefit from these web-based, truly interactive presentations. Inspired by the cutting-edge Meteor framework, Shiny leverages reactive principles to weave together rich applications with minimal code. It’s not a general purpose framework, you wouldn’t use it to build a storefront, but it doesn’t claim to be such. We talk about the development of the Shiny framework, the choices that were made, and how Shiny is accessible to novice and expert R users alike by design here.

As a bit of an aside, there’s one amazing tidbit from this video which should not be missed. Joe Cheng nearly had his love of computer programming bored out of him by the worst summer camp *ever*! I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did!

Related

Shiny: R made interactive @ useR! 2014

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useR conference sessions R useR ggvis RStudio visualization shiny web interfaces
At useR! 2014, one of the most anticipated presentations was Joe Cheng’s Shiny: R made interactive. It was but one of the of a fantastic series of talks by RStudio representatives; check out Winston Chang’s ggvis: Interactive graphics in R for another great talk. Shiny begins with your R code and ends with the customer’s view: an interactive, browser-accessible application. This enables you to place a great deal of power into your users’ hands to customize their view and provides a variety of new and innovative ways to interact with the data, such as by tuning parameters and focusing on sub-populations. Essentially, Shiny functions by allowing you to “wire up” up a reactive application, greatly speeding up the development of a data and analysis based web app.

JJ Allaire, the useR! 2014 interview

·2 mins
useR conference interviews R RStudio
JJ Allaire has courageously bet, time and time again, on the cutting edge of technologies. In doing so, he has not only benefited from the fertile rains but has often times himself been the rainmaker. He has, to a great degree, democratized development on the web by bringing the power to create interactive web applications to a wider audience than those select few who had access to both a shell account and Unix knowledge. ColdFusion was a platform by the web and for the web, and its adoption revolutionized programming ‘for the web’ as its own worthy pursuit. This story also resolutely validates the idea that by creating tools for developers at the beginning of a time of revolutionary change in technology, one could not only validate the tools but also help stage the unfolding narrative as one with many participants.